Finders Keepers

“You’re not going to murder me in the night, are you?” Emily asks. I laugh. I tell her she’s so funny. Obviously, I’m not going to murder her in the night. That should go without saying. I need my laptop back first.

That’s the whole point of making friends with Emily Harper, author of the surprise bestseller Diary of an Octopus. So I could get inside her apartment and take back what’s mine.

Emily doesn’t know who I really am. She thinks I’m her biggest fan, her new best friend who happens to need a place to stay for a few days. She doesn’t realize the laptop she found—and took—from a busy airport almost two years ago, was mine.

I didn’t care about the laptop, just what was on it: my diary.

The one I kept many years ago as a troubled thirteen-year-old girl with a vivid imagination and a flair for the dramatic. The diary Emily Harper has now published as her own coming-of-age novel.

She thinks it's a story about a schoolgirl’s crush on her teacher, but she’s wrong. And that’s why I need to find my laptop and disappear. Because it won’t be long before someone out there recognizes the story. And when they do, they’ll know what I did all those years ago.


And what I’m capable of.